A newly arrived British expat in Majorca told me how difficult she was finding it to make friends with other parents at her daughter’s school. Having opted for the Spanish system, she waved off her daughter at the school gate each morning, unable to converse with local Majorcan mothers who had next to no English, or with her child’s teachers. Although she and her husband were taking Spanish classes, she didn’t feel confident enough to conduct a conversation and had begun to feel isolated and miserable.

Some expats find it difficult making friends at the school gates

I remember my son’s first day at a local Spanish school. He made my husband and me stop at a petrol station en route and bought a large packet of sweets. We indulged him because a daunting day lay ahead but he calmly explained his logic in the car. As the only English-speaking child at the school … Read more

Hi folks, and welcome to the Expat group on the all-new MyTelegraph community site. As some of you have already discovered, you can set up your own profile pages, make friends, have your own blogs and start discussions on subjects you think will be of interest to other Expats. All your comments right across telegraph.co.uk will appear on your profile, and registering here will register you for the website as a whole (and vice versa). There’s lots to play with, and I hope you have fun working out how to get the most of it. It’s all new to us too here on the Expat desk in London, so we’ll be learning along with you.

At the heart of our new Expat community is the group blog, which our existing four Expat bloggers – Annabel Kantaria (aka Desert Fox), Josephine McDermott (aka Chelsea Girl in China), Nick Stace (aka Nick Stace Down Under) and Anna Nicholas (aka Majorcan Pearls) – will be blogging to forthwith. Instead of their posts appearing on the old blogs.telegraph.co.uk site, they’ll be appearing here from now on, and we’ll be moving their archives over with them.

Their tales and opinions are going to drive this site, and I hope that plenty of you will create profiles, sign up to the Expat group, and start blogs and discussions to go alongside theirs. We’ll be relying on you to flag up the expat issues – big or small – that concern you, and to use this community as a way to communicate with other expats all around the globe.

The main expat site will be continuing on as normal to support you, as will the Telegraph weekly world edition newspaper, continuing to bring you the best British news every week. And don’t forget our Expat Directory, now live and waiting for you to add pins about places you know all round the world, creating the best online resource for expats everywhere.